Multilingual dinner

I went out to a Japanese restaurant in Waikiki to celebrate the end of the semester! I had a gift certificate from a publisher when I entered to win at a local academic conference. Thank you, publisher :-D The restaurant calls itself a steakhouse, but it's in the teppanyaki (鉄板焼き) genre in my opinion. I think these teppanyaki places are very interesting - the imagination of things Japanese from outside of Japan, basically "exoticizing" so much. It was in New Zealand that I first visited a teppanyaki restaurant, and I thought - NO WAY, this is NOT authentic Japanese... Performance of flipping shrimps etc. in the air and juggling with cooking utencils. My mom used to say we have to be serious when we're eating, and of course when we're cooking too! Well, I'm not against reinventing Japanese food overseas - in Amherst, 看板料理 (the most popular dish?) of a new Japanese restaurant was a 'California roll,' and if you know authentic Japanese food, avogado is not something you should normally find there...　看板にアボガドですか～？

Anyway, what made this dinner multilingual was that on the table, there were three groups seated together, and one chef cooked for all of us together. And the chef entertained us not just by those interesting performances but also with 'talk'. The two other groups at the table were a mother and son from Latin America speaking Spanish, and a Japanese-American international married couple with a bilingual baby. The chef entertains us with some routine jokes (I learned later), such as calling a side dish 'Japanese french fries' (Well, guess what he called Japanese french fries ;-) ), but that's not all. He wanted to entertain the Spanish speaking guests, and spoke some Spanish. And I was impressed at his courage to speak even though it was really broken （すごい片言！）... When he realized they spoke Spanish, he first said to the mom "Bonito, bonito" (Correctly "bonita" using the feminine form) and the mom apparently didn't seem to recognize that he was speaking to her in Spanish, and when he finished cooking and left, he said "Mucho gracias" (Correctly "Muchas gracias" using the plural and feminine form) - I thought oh, my gosh, looked at the two, and just as I thought, they were talking about this "mucho gracias" phrase for a while ...

And the bilingual baby gave us a moment that reminded us that there's something in Japanese that can't be translated into English. After the chef has finished cooking and left, and when a waitress came to serve more water, the baby said "Ju Ju（ジュージュー）" repeatedly, requesting more grilling in front of him. The waitress who looked Japanese asked back "Ju Ju?" and couldn't make sense (at that moment we noticed that she wasn't a speaker of Japanese), and the mom of the baby and I realized that this sound does not have an English label :-o For Japanese speakers, it's so obvious that grilling makes this sound, but this sound has no specific English label ("Shizzling?" the English speakers tried to describe.) 焼肉、鉄板焼きって言えばジュージューって聞こえてくるじゃん、そのままじゃん、For us, it just sounds as the sound goes, but it doesn't seem to work that way. People say music is universal, but I guess sounds are not, or how we hear the sounds are not.

So it was a night with good food, nice entertainment, and also thoughts on languages :-) Multilingual dinner, right?